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Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

Amy Tan

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Amy Tan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: February 19
Essayist
Film Writer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Oakland
California
Amy Ruth Tan
Inattention
Expectation
Shaped
Expectations
Fate
Half

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Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
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Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
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For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
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So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.
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I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.
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That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.
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Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei
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Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
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Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls
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All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. -Ying Ying
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What is a secret wish? It is what you want but cannot ask.
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Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.
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too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
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Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I'm number one in his life. I'm not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.
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He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.
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I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
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But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.
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If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry.
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I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
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No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
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